Nordic Aquafarms application soon to enter 'hyperdrive' in Belfast review
COURTESY / NORDIC AQUAFARMS INC.
An interior view of Nordic Aquafarms’ land-based aquaculture facility in Frederikstad, Norway. The Belfast Planning Board is reviewing the company’s municipal permit applications, a process expected to result in about 80 decisions.
The Belfast Planning Board is scheduled to hold the last of its public hearings next week on separate components of Nordic Aquafarms’ application to construct an indoor salmon farm, and will begin to consider the project as a whole.
The board has conducted 11 public meetings since the city received the application in June, Wayne Marshall, director of code and planning, told the city council at a recent meeting.
The board has made decisions on only a few matters so far.
At its most recent meeting, the board held hearings on two matters: air emissions and visual impact.
Nordic amended its application with some 400 pages of new information regarding air emissions, partly to address Maine Department of Environmental Protection requirements, since the application was first submitted, he said.
And Nordic has also amended its application to add eight smokestacks, each 65 feet high, which trigger the need for the board to take a fresh look at a previous decision regarding visual impact, he said.
At its Jan. 8 meeting, the board will also review the impact on traffic.
“Then the board goes into hyperdrive,” Marshall said.
The board has weekly meetings scheduled throughout January and two meetings in the first week of February, devoted just to Nordic, he said.
The upcoming meetings, he said, will be an opportunity for parties of interest and the general public to move from comments on specific comments and consider the project in its entirety.
After that, he said, the board will dive into the five applications it has to consider as part of city permitting. That includes ordinances regarding site plans, zoning, and shoreland use.
“The board has been working really hard” as it takes in a lot of information, some of it highly technical, he added.
“It’s been a long time since [Nordic’s] original announcement in January 2018,” Marshall said.
It took Nordic 17 months to submit its application to city. The application has now been in the review process about six months.
"Things are still at the development stage, which is not atypical for this scale of project," Marshall said.
Nordic Aquafarms Inc. has submitted an application to develop a land-based salmon aquaculture facility on a 56-acre site located on the northwesterly side of U.S. Route 1 near the lower reservoir of the Little River.
Nordic proposes to develop the project in two phases over five or more years. Total production capacity at build-out is estimated to be 72.7 million pounds of salmon per year, according to city documents
Phase 1 involves the construction of about 414,450 square feet of buildings. Phase 2 involves the construction of about 392,804 square feet of buildings. Each phase involves rearing and processing a similar amount of salmon.
The facility would use a Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) to process water used in rearing the salmon in land-based tanks. At full build-out, the facility is projected to use about 1,205 gallons of freshwater per minute and about 3,925 gallons of saltwater per minute.
The freshwater is proposed to be obtained from three sources: the Belfast Water District, on-site groundwater wells and the extraction of "surficial" water from Reservoir 1 on the Little River. Saltwater will be obtained from Belfast Bay via two new offshore water intake pipes that extend about 6,300 feet from the high annual tide into the bay. The RAS system also involves Nordic Aquafarms treating and regularly discharging the freshwater and saltwater used to rear salmon back into Belfast Bay via a discharge pipe that extends offshore about 3,400 feet from the high annual tide.
Nordic Aquafarms is the first company in Norway to move salmon production into large-scale land-based systems, according to its website.
Its Fredrikstad Seafoods facility under construction is the largest such facility in Europe. In Denmark, it’s also investing in land-based production of yellowtail kingfish for international sushi and sashimi markets.
In September, the Bucksport Planning Board approved Whole Oceans’ application for a salmon aquaculture facility on the former Verso Paper mill site, contingent on the Portland-based company obtaining other necessary permits for the project.
Another indoor fish farming company, Dutch aquaculture company Kingfish Zeeland in November announced it was exploring a plan to develop a land-based recirculation facility in Jonesport to raise yellowtail kingfish.
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments